By Alexandra Pirici
With contributions by Maja & Reuben Fowkes, Paco Calvo, Raluca Voinea
Movement exercises performed together with Maria Mora & Mihai Mihalcea
Masks and set design for introduction lecture: Andrei Dinu
Project coordinator: Radu Lesevschi
Produced by Asociatia Solitude Project
The modern production of knowledge and truth about the world implied that the world can only be known, trully, through attaining a point of (masculine) objectivity; a supposedly “view from nowhere”, requiring a rational mastery of intellect over body (the two seen as separate), putting aside subjective, sensual experience. Regardless of the fact that the situated reality of the body is intrinsic part of any human or human-made process of observing the world, the natural and the sensual were associated with womanhood, with the non-rational, the intuitive, the inferior, in a long lineage of apparently uncanny connections between religious dogma, monastic brotherhoods of men, (military) technology and science academies. Copernicus, Galileo and then Newton apparently had no use for bodies and subjective experience. The body couldn’t feel itself moving with the Earth around the Sun; the body and one’s senses were unable to offer The Truth about the world, and were therefore deemed unable to offer any truth.
Natural history begins by observing and describing the natural environment with the help of representation through drawing, but continues to take the processes of representation, learning and knowledge production further away from the whole body. The active involvement of the entire body and sensorial apparatus in knowing the world, with all (…)
O Enciclopedie Corporală a Relațiilor Dintre Plante/ Embodied Encyclopedia of Relationships Between Plants (ongoing project)
Fragmente Dintr-un Jurnal Despre Plante și Oameni în Timpul Pandemiei/ Excerpts From a Diary on Plants and People During the Pandemic
– Raluca Voinea
“Let’s garden our way out of this apocalypse.” (Carlos Magdalena)
Asparagus 17 March 2020

Second day of lockdown in Bucharest. The city is eerily quiet. The promise of a garden on the roof terrace starts with the leftovers from last year. Cancelled three trips for the following two weeks. Being confined inside becomes a privilege for some, a terrible burden for others.